


Fine Lines

by Misaya



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Levi/Erwin Smith, Established Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:24:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5518529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi has never been good at dealing with times of peace. The line between restlessness and anger is a thin one to tread.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fine Lines

**Author's Note:**

> Commission from lostcauses-noregrets on Tumblr. Thanks so much!

As strange as it sounds, times of peace grate on Levi’s nerves, shredding them down fine to the bone. He means peace lightly, a blanket term for the times when the majority of the Survey Corps is confined behind the rigidity of the walls like bodies strained down tight in boxes. Trapped, he thinks as the gates drop down behind them, caged like animals, and though they disperse over the buildings, fade into the alleys, several of them going to see their families and loved ones they’ve missed on expedition, Levi is not that type of person and never has been.

He’s delivered his heart to Erwin years ago. Or, at the very least, what remnants there are of it. Kuchel, Isabel, and Farlan have taken the lion’s share to the grave with them, and other members of the corps tear bits and pieces away with every of their deaths. For every person Levi feeds to the Titans, he feels himself withering, more and more and more, a hollowed shell scooped dry.

And so he hides, or tries his level best to, at least. He wraps himself in a cloak of indifference, of caustic wit and bitter repartee, in the hopes that maybe he can stop himself from fading away completely. It’s worked, to an extent, and he’s halted the deterioration just enough to find that, much to his surprise, he can follow again. He can trust again. He can love again.

Erwin knows this, but to his credit, he never tries to lean heavy on the fragile foundations Levi’s heart and soul are working hard to reestablish. He includes Levi in the plans that he makes, in the formations he charts out on paper and later translates to people on the field, and Levi weighs in when he feels appropriate, his mind working faster than his mouth can keep up with so that his sentences come out all short and stilted. Levi is trapped by the rigidity of a language he has only recently mastered reading and writing in, but luckily here, in the body of the Survey Corps, he’s finally found another niche of people who can understand and communicate with the person he’s become.

They’ve managed to wriggle their ways beneath his skin, seeing past his feeble attempts at disguise, looking past the way he carries himself tight and rigid and self-contained. Their names grace the wrinkled, yellowing pages of the little black leather bound book he keeps shoved beneath his mattress, the one he takes out at night when he can’t sleep because it’s far too quiet, and the quiet has always been a deceiving cover for something else, something worse, something beyond the measurement of words. It’s abject absence, of words and breaths and laughter from fallen friends, missing in the line of battle, and Levi tries not to hold too hard onto their voices because it’s easier to miss something you’ve never known.

Nothing good happens when it’s quiet, when Levi can hear the steady metronome of his own heartbeat pounding crimson through his veins, and so, during times of peace, Levi does his best to fill every free minute with noise.

Horse rides in the morning, sore but easy in the butter-soft saddle that cradles his weight and frame to perfection. The wind whispers through his hair, and the loud clops of his horse’s feet on the cobblestones that transition slowly to trampled dirt paths that lead into grassy fields sound almost like gunshots. But it’s something, anything, and the soothing sway of motion, rhythmic and monotonous, can almost lull him into believing that all of this has just been a bad dream that he’ll wake up from soon.

Cleaning in the afternoons, the soft swish of cloth over stone as he reassembles the parts of his life that he can keep in order. The bedsheets and pillowcases gleam white as snow pinned tight on the clotheslines, whapping in the wind as the sun dries them and scents them with the smells of distant flowers. Levi buries his nose into the cotton at night, inhaling deeply, and dreams of lands he’s only heard about, places he’s only read about by flickering candlelight as his finger traces slowly over the weathered pages, ink rubbing off onto his fingertips an indelible mark.

Dinner, discussions, training until evening, until the sun spills the rich yellow of a broken egg over the horizon to paint everything with fading gold. He keeps himself busy, tiring himself out in body and mind alike.

The writing keeps him busy, too. The scratch of the pen nib over wrinkled paper as he scrawls large looping letters over the pages fills his thoughts with a calming white noise. The side of his right hand is blackened more often than not, smudged with ink, the words smearing as he writes, the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he concentrates on silently sounding out and spelling the sentences.

He has plenty to write about, now. The new recruits’ names have already carved their way into his heart, and he wonders how best to approach the beginning of the new stories they’ll create together.

“Levi!” Erwin’s voice jolts him out of his reverie, and he looks up from his desk, where he’s been staring at a thick pile of expense reports for the past few minutes, looking without seeing. Whoever’s written these latest forms has scrawling, slanting handwriting, the letters tumbling over each other, so that Levi has to squint to make out the words, forcing himself to refocus, regroup.

When he looks up, Erwin is smiling across the office at him, and Levi’s breath catches in his throat from how utterly gorgeous the man he’s chosen to entrust his heart to is.

“What is it?” he asks, trying to make sense of the words in front of him. Reading doesn’t come naturally to him, but he does the best he can. “Do you need me?”

“Penny for your thoughts?” Erwin asks, and Levi hears a metallic ping a split second before he sees a thin copper disc spinning through the air, catching the afternoon sunlight on its faces. He snatches it out of the air, cool against his palm, places it down on the desk with a firm click without looking to see what side it’s landed on. “Whatever you’re thinking about must be pretty consuming; I’ve been trying to get your attention for the past five minutes.”

Levi flushes, but Erwin’s tone isn’t one of rebuke. It’s light, teasing, the way they can afford to be during times of peace, but it never fails to feel wrong, tainted somehow, that they can still laugh and live and love when so many others cannot.

“Nothing,” he snaps back, perhaps a bit too harshly. A shadow crosses Erwin’s face, and the oceans of his eyes fall back to his reports, his smile fading. Levi wishes he could reach out and snatch the words back, but they travel faster than his fingers can, and Erwin buries himself back in his work. Levi turns his eyes back to the slanting words, as well, but his focus is completely shot, running the conversation over in his mind again and again until he has the short exchange committed fully to memory.

***

“Levi!” The tip of Levi’s pen skitters quickly over the loops and lines that make up his name. The candle flickers on his nightstand, and he frowns as the light quivers over the paper.

“What is it?” he writes. The loop of the question mark is a neat half-circle. “Do you need me?”

“Penny for your thoughts? Whatever you’re thinking about must be pretty consuming; I’ve been trying to get your attention for the past five minutes.”

He had replied with a sharp, coarse “Nothing.” He hadn’t even given Erwin a chance to ask, and he winces at the recollection, perfect hindsight. Ink drips lightly from the pen nib to shower the paper with a splatter, but it’s negligible. He’s still searching for the right words to make amends.

“Sorry, I’ve been lost in my head,” he writes, the tip of his pen resting heavy on the paper to blot out a large puddle of black. No, that doesn’t feel quite right. He speaks and writes in different ways, when he has time to think about it, and he crosses out the latest sentence with a strong hand and a sharp point.

“It’s nothing.” Said in a softer tone, maybe making Erwin think he’d been daydreaming. Erwin would probably tease him lightly about it, tell him that he’s getting soft in his old age. But it’s not quite right, it’s not quite the perfect ending to an ideal scene, and Levi scribbles it out with a frown and a huff of distaste.

Ink dabs across the back of his hand while he thinks, gnawing on the edge of the pen, a bad habit that neither he nor Erwin could manage to shake in all the years they’ve been together. Surely all the time spent in each other’s company must make mutual comprehension easier, surely Erwin understands that Levi’s biting speech isn’t to be taken seriously.

Surely he knows that Levi goes looking for trouble, in a stopgap measure to ensure that trouble does not come looking for him first.

***

“I was just thinking about you.” Huh. That might be something he’d say, and he writes it down in a large, looping script. His hand has started to cramp, his fingers tensing around the pen, and the journal pages bear the faint indentation of the words he presses down into the paper as though he can own them, as though if he writes them down with enough force, they can become his own. History is written by the winners, and Levi wonders if he too can one day learn to be victorious, if one day he’ll be able to still his wicked tongue.

Erwin would reply with a soft smile that would light up the office more than the golden sunlight that had filtered through the windows that afternoon, and he might push away from his desk, might walk over to Levi to drop kisses into the part of his hair. It would be a happy ending, and Levi sighs, cursing himself for not thinking of it earlier, for not thinking of it when it mattered.

He blows on the wet curls of ink, waiting for it to seal itself to the paper before closing the journal with a snap and tucking it back underneath his mattress. He caps the pen, the bottle of ink, and sets them back on the nightstand where they belong, for use another day.

***

History is written by the victors, but Levi feels the very opposite of triumphant with every resounding thwack and thud the boy’s body makes beneath the leather of his boot. The boy. It’s easier not to think in names. Blood stains over his skin and over the concrete floor, and Levi tries not to think about the fact that the rhythm of his kicks tap out a cadence to match the pulse behind his eardrums.

He knows, and Erwin knows, that this is not senseless. It means something, but Levi’s hard-pressed to keep the meaning in mind as Eren remains stubbornly silent, refusing to beg for mercy. Bright turquoise eyes, glossy with unshed tears, glare up at him through a fall of dark brown hair, and Levi wonders if he’ll have Eren’s blood on his hands, too, instead of just the soles of his shoes.

***

He records it differently, of course. The leather journal tucked beneath his mattress does not make light of the situation, does not try to skirt around the violence, but he communicates what he kept silent in the courthouse, words to make Eren understand. Eren’s glare seems to burn up at him from the pages; he can’t find the right explanation, and he eventually gives up when Erwin knocks, one two three light taps on the wood, and he flips the journal closed on the words, still wet, to let him in.

The letters smear over the back of the previous page, obliterating the history that Levi has attempted to rewrite. He sleeps on paragraphs of rewrites, on scribbled-out sentences, and the journal grows thicker by the day, weighted down with the heaviness of memory.

***

Times of peace grate on Levi’s nerves, and he becomes a weapon, a double-edged sword with sharply honed edges that hurt both him and those he cares about. The members of the Survey Corps have been cooped up within the walls for a month or so now, while protocol is finalized and Erwin and the rest of the veterans discuss the tentative plans for the next expedition. Levi is getting restless, his legs jittering beneath the trestle tables as Erwin spreads out yet another crumpled scroll again, smoothing it out over his elegant script detailing his directives, documenting the minutiae of what he plans for them to accomplish. His restlessness turns into irritation turns into full-blown anger, an oil-soaked fuse ready to be lit at the slightest spark.

One evening, when it is just the two of them, when Mike and Hanji and Nanaba have already retreated to their separate rooms in the barracks and Erwin is going over his plans yet again, Levi scoffs and pushes back from the table. His footsteps ring clack click clack click over the stone tiles as he marches stiffly to his room. He flings the door open, the slam of it smacking against the wall echoing off down the corridors, and it’s almost enough to drown out Erwin’s quick footsteps following closely behind.

“What the hell was that?” Erwin asks, a snap in his voice and a fire in his eyes. “I’m just trying to have some sort of rational conversation with you.”

“No, you’re not,” Levi hisses, barely retaining the presence of mind needed to reach out and slam the door quickly closed behind Erwin. It won’t deaden the sound of their anger completely, but it’ll muffle it just enough so that people passing by might think it’s just a lover’s spat, a normal little storm that’ll blow itself out within the hour, instead of the rollicks of thunder that underlie something more serious. “You just like hearing yourself talk. It’s useless shit, that’s what it is, because nothing, nothing ever goes according to your fucking plans!” Levi slams his fist against the wall, and a small shower of dust sprinkles from the ceiling to mar the shiny surface of the tops of his boots.

Erwin looks affronted, and Levi feels a guilty, savage sort of pleasure flush through him. Erwin’s never irritated, Erwin’s never angry, but here he is, both, in all his tainted glory, and Levi’s managed to get under his impenetrable armor in a way that matters.

“Nothing goes according to plan, does it?” His tone is icy, casting a chill over Levi’s heart, but he commits the cold syllables to memory anyway. “You’re more than welcome to leave the Corps, Levi. I’m not keeping you here.” It’s a lie, and they both know it, just like they both know Levi won’t rise to the bait.

“You are,” Levi hisses right back. “More than you know.” He grips Erwin’s lapels in clenched fists gone white-knuckled from the strain of trying to hold himself together, trying to hold themselves together.

The fine line between anger and passion dissipates far too fast for either of them to see, and suddenly Levi finds himself being pushed back towards his bed, his shoulder blades digging ravines into the mattress as Erwin presses him down with stronger hands.

Their teeth click together in a furious flurry of kisses that leaves Levi breathless, and Erwin’s fingers all but rip apart the panels of his shirt in his efforts to get Levi bare beneath him. The kisses that Erwin sucks into his skin ache like bruises, splotchy and scarlet, and long fingers leave bruises around Levi’s wrists like manacles. His breath hisses in his lungs as Erwin lowers himself to catch a nipple in his mouth, his tongue flicking, teeth scraping lightly against pebbled flesh, and Levi is straining against the zipper of his pants even as Erwin reaches to undo it.

They skip through the preparations, angry, antsy, crawling out of their skins and into each other’s as they litter bites across planes of flesh that’ll bloom like crimson morning glories later, beneath cotton confines so no one will know that they are there. Erwin slots himself into Levi with a long, drawn-out groan, his head tipping forwards so that all Levi can see between the bright starbursts of pain is gold. He falls in love with the burn, with the bruises, with the utter agony that comes with fulfillment instead of loss, and Erwin sighs as he stirs the pain into pleasure with every languid thrust.

Levi’s moans catch in his throat, a whine, a whimper, a choked off sob as the head of Erwin’s cock nudges against the firm nub of his prostate, and he leaks sticky silver across Erwin’s palm when Erwin reaches down to take Levi in his hand. Erwin rubs the pad of his thumb over the weeping head of Levi’s cock, bringing his hand up to his mouth to roll his tongue over the skin and gather the bittersweet taste of Levi into his mouth.

Levi groans, flinging his arms over his eyes to hide the tears that spark bright in his eyes at the rampant ecstasy running wild through his veins, and he’s hard pressed to believe that love can be so brutal.

He comes in strings of pearls across Erwin’s fingers and the taut planes of his abdomen, sobbing brokenly as Erwin spills himself a heated inferno inside of him, stoking a fire from the inside out. The flames burn iridescent at the centers, and clean him a pure bright, white.

“I love you,” Erwin whispers, his lips tingling soft against Levi’s racing pulse. Weary, Levi strokes fingers through damp gold, feathering kisses over whatever patches of sweaty skin he can reach.

“I know,” he breathes, and he does not say it back even though the muscles in Erwin’s back tense beneath Levi’s palms at the lack of admission. “I know.”

Erwin flops over, rolling off Levi into the rumpled sheets next to him, his back rising and falling in even breaths as he steadies himself for sleep. Levi longs to reach out, to smooth away the furrow of worry that he’s sure is digging a trench between the thick bushes of Erwin’s eyebrows, longs to massage away the rigid set of Erwin’s shoulders, longs to turn Erwin over to face him. His lips ache to feather Erwin’s mouth with kisses, with apologies, with assurances that of course Levi loves him, too, but he doesn’t know if the rigidity of language can fully express the extent of his affection.

Weariness claims his eyes, though, dragging them closed against his will, and for the first time in a long time, he falls into a dreamless sleep with the steady rhythms of Erwin’s breath nudging him along.

***

When Levi wakes up again, Erwin is still fast asleep, his arms curled loosely around Levi’s chest, and with only a little careful effort, Levi wriggles out of his grasp, leaning over the edge of the bed to tug out his leather journal.

By the dim light of morning, greyness filtering in through the windowpanes, Levi scribbles in large looping letters the conversation. Not many words had been exchanged, but every syllable drips with poignancy and Levi longs to capture that on paper as best he can.

“I love you,” he writes, for Erwin’s part. Erwin stirs, his fingers twitching against Levi’s thigh, his face relaxed in a way that is rare to find when he is awake.

Levi gnaws on the end of his pen, frowning, and the ink spatters on the pages, flecking black across the sheet from the splash. The tip of the pen scratches over the paper, his words, rewritten, his crossed-out sentences.

“I love you, too.” That feels too shallow, but it’s the expected answer, something for consideration. After a moment, Levi shakes his head, drawing a thin, straight line through the letters.

And then again. “I love you.” There seems to be nothing else to say, no better answer, and Levi writes down a whole column of sentiment before giving up. The words are escaping him, and he closes the leather journal shut with a soft snap before getting up to shower and get ready for the day ahead.

***

When he comes back, Erwin is wide awake, and is sitting up against the headboard with Levi’s journal in his hands.

Levi freezes, strands of wet, dark hair still falling over his eyes a curtain.

The silence is deafening.

Finally, Erwin sighs. His face is cast in shadow.

“I know,” he replies, and when he looks up, Levi can just make out the trace of a smile.

History is written by the victors, and Levi wouldn’t change a single word.


End file.
